Awesome Awful tops charts while Jamie's Comfort Food tops hardback non-fiction list

30.09.14 | Tom Tivnan - The Bookseller

David Walliams easily romped to the number one spot on the UK Official Top 50 in the strongest week of sales for booksellers since 2013.

Walliams' Awful Auntie (HarperCollins) shifted an impressive 49,086 units last week through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market outpacing the next bestselling book—Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (Phoenix, 17,032 units)—by a margin of almost three to one. Walliams' haul represents the best one-week total by a children's title in 2014 and the second best overall, only eclipsed by the 51,749 print units sold by Dan Brown's Inferno (Bantam) in the week ending 17th May.

This is the third time Walliams has scored an Official Top 50 number one—Demon Dentist (HC) hit the top spot for two consecutive weeks beginning the last week in September 2013—and the 29th time he has had the Children's number one.

Revenue for the week through the TCM was £27.5m, the strongest week in 2014 by 5.7%, and 3.3% up on the same week in 2013.

Sales were driven by what could be termed a "mini-Super Thursday", a series of high-profile releases on 25th September with 132 titles published on that day hitting last week's TCM Top 5,000. 

After Walliams, new hardback titles were lead by Wilbur Smith's Desert God. The sequel to 1994's River God, it is the octogenarian's first of a six-book deal with HarperCollins, which he moved to after being published for 45 years by Macmillan. Shifting 12,118 units, Desert God nabbed Smith a Bookseller Original Fiction number one for the 21st time.  Victoria Hislop's The Sunrise (Headline), also released on the 25th, had a strong week with 8,548 copies sold, good enough for second place in Original Fiction.

Jamie OIiver's Jamie's Comfort Food (Michael Joseph, ) topped Hardback Non-Fiction for the fifth straight week, selling 12,701 copies. Strong non-fiction debutants for the week included the latest One Direction autobiography, Who We Are (HC, 5,945 copies), Stephen Fry's More Fool Me (Michael Joseph, 4,174) and Terry Pratchett's essay collection, A Slip of the Keyboard (Doubleday, 2,729).

The pre-publicity for the David Fincher film adaptation helped Flynn to the top two spots in Mass Market Fiction, with the tie-in and original editions combing to sell 27,925 copies, ending the two-week run at the top for Ian Rankin's Saints of the Shadow Bible (Phoenix).